Welcome to the Internet home of Matthew W. Quinn. I've completed two novels, working on two more, and am a cultural critic besides. Regular contributor to podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

What I'm Working On Right Now...

Current Projects

*Battle for the Wastelands

*Escape from the Wastelands

*Untitled Superhero Project

*"Coil Gun" Screenplay

Battle for the Wastelands has been finished for some time. I've been tinkering with it, revising it based on suggestions from my friends Nick, Korsgaard, and others, and awaiting the final meeting of my writing group where we go over the whole novel. That's slated for later this week. Once I make the revisions based on those comments, I'll start sending it out to agents I've identified by reading the Acknowledgements sections of books like Dead Iron by Devon Monk, the Clockwork Century novels by Cherie Priest, and others. Hopefully I won't have many significant changes to make, especially since I took out all the phonetic spelling of dialect ("'em" for "them," "somethin'" for "something," etc) at the behest of pretty much all of my writer friends.

I've also been working on Escape from the Wastelands, the second book in a planned series of eight. Right now I'm done with the first three chapters and a significant block of text toward the end (it was originally the second half of one book) and need to finish Chapter Four. A lot of the chapter is written already--I just need to write a battle scene in the middle. When I brought Chapter Three before my Lawrenceville writing group, the group wanted more human interaction (including a sense of humor) among the characters, so I've been working on that. The character Will has been established as kind of a jerk, so I figured someone not concerned about the feelings of others would be interested in pranks. I haven't found the chance to work that into Battle, but I was able to plug that into Escape.

I've also gotten started on a new project based on how Abaddon Books has opened up for novella submissions. I'm not familiar with any of Abaddon Books' existing worlds and they are open for new worlds, so I decided to start on a new project. Not going to go into a lot of detail at the moment, but the premise involves supervillains relocating their operations to the Third World after the rich countries develop a significant deterrent to their behavior. The deadline to contribute is in September. I've written the prologue and plotted out the rest of the book. If Abaddon Books isn't interested or if the story gets too long, this one might be a candidate for self-publishing.

Finally, I got a lot of work done on my screenplay adaptation of my short story "Coil Gun," which appears in Pressure Suite: Digital Science Fiction #3. At DragonCon 2011, S.M. Stirling said short stories make good movie scripts and books make good miniseries, and I decided to test that theory out. I wrote 15 script pages today, bringing it up to 62 pages total. The problem is, a page equals a minute of film time. A good script is 90-120 pages long. Not sure how I'm going to add 28 pages. Maybe I can describe some of the space battles in more detail rather than just saying spacecraft are fighting.